Winston Churchill's grandson says Boris Johnson is 'totally wrong'

Mayor of London Boris Johnson wrote an editorial on Friday saying that President Obama is wrong to say that Britain should stay in the EU.

He also wrote that Obama was wrong to move a statue of wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill out of the Oval Office — and Churchill’s grandson Nicholas Soames is not happy about it.

Soames has been a Conservative MP since 1983 and is a long time supporter of Britain’s membership of the EU, so it’s no surprise he didn’t like Johnson’s Euroscepticism. But, what Soames really disliked was Johnson’s use of his grandfather to illustrate why Obama doesn’t understand Britain.

Here’s what Johnson wrote in the Sun on Friday morning, the added emphasis is ours.

Something mysterious happened when Barack Obama entered the Oval Office in 2009. Something vanished from that room, and no one could quite explain why. It was a bust of Winston Churchill — the great British war time leader… But on day one of the Obama administration it was returned, without ceremony, to the British embassy in Washington. No one was sure whether the President had himself been involved in the decision. Some said it was a snub to Britain. Some said it was a symbol of the part-Kenyan President’s ancestral dislike of the British empire — of which Churchill had been such a fervent defender.

Johnson then basically said that Churchill would have supported a Brexit.

At the very heart of Winston Churchill’s political beliefs was what he saw as the supreme right of every voter, with his or her little pencil, to decide who governs the country.

Soames started tweeting at Johnson using the hashtag #growupgetreal to voice his frustration.

Soames wasn’t the only politician to be offended by Jonhson’s column. Labour MPs Diane Abbott and Chuka Umunna Tweeted that they were unhappy that Johnson used the words “part-Kenyan” to describe Obama.